


Hurts A Little Less

by ByAStream



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Bucky Barnes Recovering, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-14
Updated: 2020-07-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:15:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25261441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ByAStream/pseuds/ByAStream
Summary: Bucky knew he was never at his best. But you were a constant, helping him on the days where things were difficult.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Reader
Comments: 4
Kudos: 40





	Hurts A Little Less

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr: jbbarnesnnoble.tumblr.com

He stood, staring blankly out the window. The sun was shining, but you knew a darkness was battling inside. You stood by him, day in and day out. The line between friends and more had blurred a long time ago. You sighed as you stood from where you sat on the couch, heading for the kitchen. 

You loved him, more than you loved anyone before. You had been down that road before, thinking you could fix someone, heal them. You knew you couldn’t. It wasn’t a healthy mentality to have. He wasn’t a broken toy. He was a human being, one who had been through unimaginable things. You knew the only thing you could do was make sure he knew you were there, that you cared, that you loved him. You couldn’t fight that battle for him, as much as you wished you could. It was the one battle he had to face one on one. At the end of the day, when the fighting became too much, you would be there to hold him, to support him, but you weren’t the one healing him. No. That was something he had to take charge of. 

He stood, staring blankly out the window. Thoughts swirled around his head. Every failure. Every life he had taken. In startling clarity. The Starks hit hardest, especially now that he had worked through that trauma with Tony. It had taken multiple counseling sessions for them to reach an understanding, to reach common ground. It had surprisingly been Tony’s idea. 

_ “If we’re going to work together, you and I have problems to resolve and Pepper has informed me that punching you repeatedly is not a productive way of resolving our issues,” Tony said. Bucky looked at him with an unreadable expression. _

_ “Buck?” you asked, looking at him with concern.  _

_ “What’s the catch? You would’ve killed me if Steve had let you,” Bucky said. Tony glared at him. _

_ “You killed my parents. I think I’m entitled to a bit of anger. You in or not? Because we’re not going on missions until we resolve this because no one trusts that we won’t kill one another,” Tony said.  _

_ “Okay,” Bucky said, stunning everyone in the room. Tony opened his mouth, prepared to continue arguing his case. _

_ “Wait...you agreed?” Tony asked. Bucky nodded. Dr. Thornton had been telling him he needed to start working through accepting his past. She had been encouraging him to work things through with Tony if Tony approached him. Elizabeth Thornton was a force to be reckoned with. Her husband had been a SHIELD agent, close to Fury. She worked with the children and adults involved with the Avengers initiative now.  _

_ “Well, alright then,” Tony said. _

Their sessions had been filled with tension to start. You were the one constant, always there like his own Northern star, guiding him home again, back to some sense of stability. You gave him space to breathe, to exist, to process. Steve was well meaning, but his oldest friend could be overbearing at times with his need to check in on Bucky. Sam, as much as Bucky hated to admit it, had been a help there. Reminding Steve that Bucky needed to adjust on his own terms. You were different. 

You were a quiet person, in his periphery from the day he set foot in the compound after he was cleared and the Accords were thrown out. You didn’t give him looks of pity. You didn’t crowd his space. You would enter a room and sit down in his line of vision. Sometimes you had a book, other times some sort of handheld device, what he had learned was a Switch. You were there, existing in the same space, but giving him his. 

The dark days had outnumbered the good days back then. And when it was dark, it felt like no light could break through. Like he would never be able to move forward. And then you’d ask him a question, something off the wall. At first he wouldn’t respond. He wanted to be left alone. God, did he want to be left alone. But you persisted. If it wasn’t an off the wall question, you’d launch into a story about the team, about your childhood, anything that came to your mind. Slowly it had gone from an annoyance to something he looked forward to, something that pulled him away from the dark turn his thoughts constantly took. He remembered the day he told Dr. Thornton about you.

_ “How have you been since the last time I saw you?” she asked. Bucky was quiet for a moment, looking around the familiar office. Her desk had a photo of her with a group of people, friends from home, he guessed. She came from a small town in the Pacific Northwest, Hope Valley.  _

_ “I don’t know. There’s this agent. And she’s annoying,” he said, a small smile on his face. Elizabeth kept her expression neutral, writing something down. It was the first time she’d seen him smile about something that wasn’t long since passed. It was progress. He launched into a rant about you. _

_ “But she’s real nice. Doesn’t make me try to talk like Steve. Don’t get me wrong, he’s like my brother...but...he can be overbearing,” Bucky said. _

_ “And how’s your relationship with Sam?” she asked. At this, Bucky laughed. It was a rare sound. Elizabeth wrote that down too. He might not have seen it himself, but James Buchanan Barnes had made progress since the first day in her office. He was starting to let the walls down for someone who wasn’t Steve Rogers. She knew you well. You popped in from time to time, sometimes after a difficult mission, other times because you needed to talk.  _

_ When Bucky left his appointment that afternoon, he had a soft smile on his face and you on his mind.  _

Bucky was pulled from his thoughts by your voice. He turned to see you sitting on the couch, two mugs of hot chocolate with extra whipped cream in front of you. 

“I think today is a favorites kind of day, what do you think, Buck?” you asked him, a small smile on your face. He nodded. 

“I think that’s a great idea, doll,” he said, his voice low. You still heard him. He made his way over to you, picking up his mug. You had learned since meeting Bucky that sometimes on his bad days, if you gave him choices on low effort things, it helped him. There were days where he wanted to be left alone entirely. On those days, you would make sandwiches for him and leave them in a container on his desk in his room after making sure he took his medication. What you would do after varied. Sometimes it was shopping with Natasha and Wanda. Other times you would sit and talk with Steve for a while or resort to baking if you wanted to be alone. If it wasn’t baking, you would sit and journal, occasionally checking in on Bucky through FRIDAY, something he had given you permission to do. 

“Can we order pizza? And mozzarella sticks?” Bucky asked quietly. You nodded. It was one of the things Bucky had slowly adjusted to. Being his own person again. Having agency and making decisions for himself. He had had time to start adjusting while he was recovering in Wakanda. But coming back to the US had presented new challenges, new decisions to be made, and a society that hadn’t been ready to accept that he was an Avenger until at least part of the truth had come out. 

“FRIDAY can you please order that for us? And two orders of garlic knots,” you said. FRIDAY knew your usual order. 

“The usual then?” the AI asked. 

“Yes please. Thank you,” you said. Bucky stifled a laugh at your manners. You always made sure to say please and thank you to the AI when asking for something. It was something he found endearing. 

“What?” you asked him. 

“Nothing, nothing. Just you,” he said, taking a sip of his hot chocolate. You took a sip of yours, coming away with a whipped cream mustache. He laughed a little before swiping his finger across your upper lip.

“You had a little,” he said, holding up his finger. The two of you got comfortable, turning on a movie he hadn’t seen yet. As the movie credits started to roll, you looked over at him.

“How have you been sleeping, Buck?” you asked him. He sighed as he ran a hand through his hair. The two of you weren’t at the point yet of sharing a room and you had been gone all week on a mission. He always hesitated before telling you when things had been bad. He didn’t want to place that burden on you, no matter how many times you insisted you wanted to know, that he could tell you anything. He was scared. Scared that if he told you some of the things on his mind that you would walk away, even though everything he knew about you told him that wasn’t who you were. 

“Not great. Nightmares,” he said. You nodded. 

“Did you try the tea?” you asked him. It was one of the new things you were trying. Something to help settle him down. Whether it was a placebo effect or not, it had been helping at least a little before you left. 

“Wasn’t the same as when you made it for me,” he said.

“Fair enough,” you said. The two of you sat talking for a bit. He was more relaxed than he had been earlier. As the two of you spoke, you smiled as you thought about how far he had come from those early days. 

A few days later found you sitting on the balcony late in the night. You hadn’t been able to sleep. A sense of something being wrong had settled in and you couldn’t shake it. You drained your cup of tea before checking on Bucky. You were alarmed when FRIDAY told you he was in distress. She usually was on top of letting you know, and if you weren’t there, letting Steve know. 

You barreled into his room to find him hunched over. You sat beside him as his shoulders shook. 

“May I touch you, Bucky?” you asked. He shook his head. 

“Do you want to tell me what’s bothering you?” you asked. Again, he shook his head. You stood up and grabbed a bottle of water from where they were stored in the refrigerator and looked around for the other things you needed. It used to be more frequent that he would have nightmares bad enough to shake him like that.  _ More like memories _ , you had thought. He had said they hadn’t been to that level while you were gone, just bad enough to keep him from wanting to go back to sleep. 

You handed him the bottle of water while you busied yourself in the kitchenette making a cup of tea for him. It was routine now. You never pushed him. He would talk if he was ready. If not to you, then to Dr. Thornton or Steve. If he really didn’t want to talk, he would write about it. It was progress from where he had been when you met him, when the two of you weren’t even friends. Back then he never spoke, unless it was short sentences, and even then it was mostly to Steve. 

You brought him the tea, sitting down beside him. He reached for you after finishing the tea, pulling you on to his lap and into a hug. You wrapped your arms around him, holding him more than he was holding you. 

Bucky’s thoughts were still racing. You were there. You were alive. You were okay. His nightmares had taken a new turn. One that saw you ending up hurt or worse because of him. His biggest fear now was hurting you. He knew he wasn’t perfect. He knew that his trauma would be a lifelong process of working through. He knew that he would never fault you for walking away. But you still hadn’t. You stayed, patiently waiting, listening, helping. You were his reminder that there was still good. It wasn’t you alone, but you were who he was around most.

He saw good in how Wanda would sneak off to volunteer at the children’s hospital, reading to the kids and spending time with them, entertaining them with her magic, a reminder that she wasn’t only a force for destruction. He saw it in how Peter Parker helped out at a local soup kitchen, both in the city and near the compound. Peter Parker, who had taken time to explain to Bucky what the hell a meme was, knowledge that Bucky had one hundred percent weaponized against the team, making them groan on more than one occasion. Bucky saw good in how Natasha spent some of her time off helping victims of abuse, in how Tony had started an actual internship program for students from low income backgrounds. He spent a lot of time watching, observing while lost in his own head. He wasn’t sure the team knew what the others really did in their free time away. None of them ever broadcast those things. But Bucky saw them. It grounded him, in a way. Another beacon of light, of hope.

You felt Bucky slowly start to relax. His arms loosened and you pulled back a little. He was looking at you, a small smile on his face.

“Thank you,” he said.

“For what?” you asked.

“Everything you do. You don’t have to do the things you do for me, but you do,” he said. You shook your head.

“Because I love you. Our friends love you. And we never want you to forget that you’re loved, Bucky,” you said. He placed a soft kiss to your forehead. He knew the road was long, but with you by his side, with his friends by his side, he knew it would be easier. It would never be easy, life so very rarely was. But if there was one thing James Buchanan Barnes was sure of, it was that he would never be alone, not truly, and that made all the difference. 


End file.
